Abstract
On 3 April 1834, a controversial inquest opened at the Bull Public House in Oxford. The city coroner told the jury that an ‘unknown’ child’s body was found on April Fool’s Day. A local fisherman hooked a small torso floating downstream to ‘Preacher’s Pool’ in St. Ebbe’s parish. The decomposed cadaver was cut into parts. It was fished out of one of the deepest eddies of the River Cherwell. Coroner’s records indicate that murder victims and infanticide cases were often discarded in pieces. Chapter 2 showed that corpses were thrown into fast-running, murky water late at night to avoid prosecution. In the watery grave forensic evidence became corrupted. The Oxford coroner asked a local surgeon, ‘Mr Webb’, to examine the ‘drowning case’ and rule out foul play. What he reported back caused an anatomy scandal. Local outrage was expressed that a lack of pauper funerals might have been behind a trade in body parts. The small corpse had been dismembered and sold to the highest bidder for dissection. This undignified end hinted at a complex economy of supply in Oxford.
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Hurren, E.T. (2012). Balancing the Books: The Business of Anatomy at Oxford University. In: Dying for Victorian Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230355651_6
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